The exemplary embodiment relates to opinion mining and finds particular application in connection with an authoring assistant for assisting a user in reducing incoherence between a review and a rating which is intended to capture the overall sentiment of the review.
Opinion mining refers to the determination of the attitude a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic, written in natural language, and is applicable to a wide range of applications involving natural language processing, computational linguistics, and text mining. Opinion mining is of particular interest to businesses seeking to obtain the opinions of customers and other reviewers on their products and services. Opinions are often expressed on social networks, blogs, e-forums, and in dedicated customer feedback pages of company websites.
Opinions are often expressed in natural language text using specific words, which can be considered as having a sentiment which is positive, i.e., indicating that the author has a good opinion of the item that he is writing about, or negative, i.e., that the author has a bad opinion. The words used can include adjectives (beautiful, ugly), verbs (love, hate), nouns (talent, nuisance), and sometimes adverbs (admirably, annoyingly). Each of these pairs includes a positive and a negative example.
An author drafting a review of a particular product or service is often asked to provide an overall rating of that product or service which is intended to capture the author's overall opinion of the item that is being reviewed. The author may post the review on a website for others to see. The author may be unaware that, in some instances, the comments in the review are not reflected in the overall rating, rendering the review incoherent. Readers of the review may thus find it unhelpful or misleading.
The exemplary embodiment provides an authoring assistant which assists an author by providing an analysis of the author's review which can be displayed to the author on a graphical user interface.